For young children, living with a chronic illness can be very difficult. In addition to dealing with the mental stresses of serious medical treatment and loneliness, these children must also face, on a daily or hourly basis, a variety of medical procedures. Both children and their parents must regularly practice and perform these procedures to maintain the well-being of the child. Children suffering from chronic illnesses must learn to live with many devices that monitor their health and manage their symptoms. Although these conventional devices are critical to maintaining the child's health, children often view them as invasions of personal space and frequently see the devices as unwanted foreign objects.
Children with chronic illnesses are unprepared to manage their illnesses on a daily basis and are therefore likely to suffer medical crises. These crises can be avoided by gaining a fuller understanding of the chronic illness. Education for the child-patient and the parents is critical to proper management of the child's disease. Parents, and especially their children, must become active participants in the treatment of their disease.
These children are often not allowed to practice their own medical procedures, which can be critical to their lives. Until now, they lack a method to gain hands on experience in mastering their disease and, as a result, they must take a passive role in their own care, deferring to parents, teachers, and other care takers to practice the medical procedures that are so critical to their well being.
For a child with a chronic illness, behavior modifications early in life can lead to immense health savings later on. It is currently difficult to make children aware of the ramifications of their unhealthy behaviors and as a result typical methods revert to scare tactics and statistics aimed at parents.
Most parents and children lack health education and medical training, and outpatient care is conventionally limited to brief interactions with physicians and assistants at treatment centers. For parents, learning that they will have a huge amount of medical responsibility due to their child's illness can be unnerving. Further, both the child and the parents must learn a huge amount of information that is critical to the child's well-being, and trying to absorb this array of information can be overwhelming. Children and parents must enforce dietary restrictions, closely follow medication schedules, attend frequent physician visits, and administer routines of injections. Children and parents must also keep up-to-date on any changes in these regimens and incorporate them immediately into their routines.
Providing medical education via a hands-on method increases the chances for correct care in the same scenario in real life. This enables those children who cannot yet practice procedures on themselves to learn proper care practices in a safe environment that prepares them for realistic potential scenarios.
Providing medical education in a relaxed atmosphere for parents increases the likelihood of information retention. Further, interacting with the child through playtime exercises, for example with a doll, can spur information retention by creating a fun and nurturing atmosphere. Thus, there is a need for medical education for both children and parents that is provided in a relaxed atmosphere where the child can play with an inanimate object. This education may teach children and parents how to perform the actions necessary to maintain the health of the child. Providing the education in this manner may also help the child mentally cope with the stresses of having a chronic illness, including helping the child overcome feelings of loneliness and isolation created by the chronic illness. If the child learns that the doll suffers from the same affliction as the child, the child may feel compassion and share a bond with the doll. Features increasing the humanism of the doll such as a glowing or pulsating heart and a heat generating unit may increase the child's connection to the doll and encourage the child to medically treat the doll and learn about its illness.